The Death of the Stubborn Developer

The late-night follow-up to the May 2024 Death of the Junior Developer post that, in Steve's words, "made people mad." The key correction: "junior" was the wrong word. Steve has now seen companies where the juniors have adopted chat-oriented programming and the seniors stubbornly refuse, and companies where the reverse is true. The common factor is refusal, not seniority. The thesis arrives as settled fact: chop gives enterprise engineers a conservative 30% baseline boost, often more, sometimes 10× or 20× on the right task. The essay anticipates the Devil's Advocate counter — fully autonomous agents are right around the corner — and Steve, mid-essay, gets the real-time update that Devin had gone GA the day after he posted the draft, narrowing its claims to batch refactoring. He treats that as confirmation: industry-changing technologies grow incrementally, and a big-bang autonomous-agent moment isn't visibly arriving. Idan Gazit of GitHub Next gets a generous, named treatment as the smartest version of the opposing view.

The closing analogy: "crusty old assembly-language holdouts still using asm in 1990 because compiler-generated code wasn't fast enough." The piece also contains the first public mention of what becomes the Gene Kim collaboration that grows over the next year into Vibe Coding — the late-night "PUBLISH IT!!" texts from Gene that got this post out the door.